Okay, I’m definitely blushing now. I concentrate on not chopping off my fingers. “Thanks. Um, I was a ballerina up until a few months ago. I was recently injured, and I, well, I won’t be able to go back.”

We’re quiet for a beat, listening to my knife hit the cutting board. Way to dampen the mood.

“I’m sorry, that sounds really shit,” Dawn says.

“It is,” I say without looking up from the knife.

Dawn slips off her stool and comes over to my side of the counter. She pulls out another knife and a second cutting board. “What can I chop to help?”

“Um, if you want to do these.” I push over the bowls of toppings I prepared.

She sizes up the food thoughtfully. “While we chop … could you possibly walk me through the saga of what happened with you and Jamie? Like, start at the beginning. Wait, how old are you? Older or younger?”

I huff a little laugh. “I’ll be nineteen in two months.”

She nods. “Slightly younger, cool. How the hell did this switcheroo excrement happen?”

As we slice basil, tomatoes, mushrooms, spinach, olives, and broccoli, I tell Dawn everything that’s gone down between Jamie, my parents, and me. Everything except the bit about my mom telling me Jamie was imaginary. I’m scared to portray her in such a negative light. I want Dawn to think I was raised by a decent person. Because Mom is a decent person. She cares, she’s just terrible at showing it. The more I think about her, the more I’m determined to believe she was forced to make the decisions she did.

Dawn listens, empathizing at all the right bits. Her attentiveness is such a stark contradiction to Jamie, who I felt itching to interject and ask things at every turn of any story I shared with her. Dawn doesn’t even butt in during the off-the-wall magic parts, which is extremely impressive. Toward the end of my tale, as I’m stirring the homemade sauce over the stove, I start crying. I’ve been trying really hard not to, but who was I kidding. I’m a human fountain; this was inevitable.

“It’s completely reasonable for you to be upset. Jamie’s pushed all this on you in a way that didn’t really leave you with much of a choice,” Dawn reassures me. She grabs my dangling non-sauce-stirring hand for a moment and squeezes it gently before letting go.

How did someone as abrasive as Jamie manage to lock down the nicest human in the world as a best friend?

I turn the stove on low. “So the SOS … last night, when I got here, I found out this amazing news from my dad about Jamie. And I still haven’t told her.”